Day 1: end

Pretty good overall. Training has been encouraging about most everything, but especially about who it is we're teaching and why. Just as I'd hoped, we have, to a diluted extent from the norm, the same kind of social standing as actual elementary, middle, and high school teachers have - we are responsible in part for the upbringing of the kids we'll be teaching. Maybe this doesn't sound so great from an American POV, but Japan treats their teachers as a kind of third parent (the cases are many where kids have gotten in trouble and their homeroom teacher has heard from the cops before their parents had). To be a teacher, of any sort, in Japan seems to be much more valued than it is in America, and to be a part of such an intrinsic part of the Japanese socialization system sounds pretty exciting to me.

But that's enough about that -training was really just a bunch of talk. Afterwards (we began at 9:30 am and ended around 4:30 pm) we headed back to the hotel. Usually train rides are stupid packed and uncomfortable, but not only was that not the case here, I had a little japanese kid com up to me on the train and say in a kind of awe-inspired whisper "kakkoi," which more or less translates to "cool." So we got back, all took a shower, and split up into I guess two groups: there are maybe 3 or 4 people in our group of 12 that (2 of whom are married) kind of go their own way, so they went off an did their own thing, and the rest of us once again split up - one of the brits here went to play soccer while me, a canadian guy, a woman from seattle, and a lawyer from texas walked to Akihabara, which is about a 35 minute walk from our place.

Akihabara is, for those of you not in the know, a two-fold mecca: first and foremost, it is the center of geeky-anime/otaku culture. There are cafes where you actually go and pay for cute little japanese women dressed in maid outfits to be coquettish, or, for lack of a better term, bitchy, to you (but in the end they make nice). There was a 6 story "adult" store with some things I'd love to mention written on the windows, but knowing who might be reading this I'll leave them to your imagination... if its that good. So we walked around, got some food (I talked it up with some Tokyo locals (oh, I didn't mention I'm one of 2 out of 12 who have even a basic knowledge of the Japanese language, and it gets to be a huge hassle takings separate orders and requests from 5 different people at once)), went to an arcade, and then walked back in something of a downpour (we're poor enough to avoid the train when we can). I was surprised to find my absolute favorite Japanese stew-of-sorts, Oden (normally a mid-fall to mid-winter kind of thing), and picked some of that up. All in all a pretty good day.

Jet lag is definitely catching up to me, so I'm going to call it a night and try to get a good 9 hours of sleep.